This is my entry the latest Tigerprint competition, Everyday Surface Design, which closes at midnight 3 February 2014.

The bit in the brief that really jumped out at me was “Female Icons … handbags, shoes …” Leaving aside the feminist in me who feels annoyed that these are the traditional female icons (I will use different means to work on that one – actually, the last time I entered a ‘female surface design’ competition with Tigerprint, I did have a go at subverting that tradition, with this ‘I Can’ design), the phrase jumped into my head ‘You can never have too many shoes,’ followed by ‘You can never have too many bags,’ and it kind of followed from there. I wanted to have some pink in there (sorry – again with the lack of subversion) and went and looked at my Kuler, where I collect colour palettes I make from photos, or just from colours, and looked for ones with pink. This one felt right – the blue works well with the pink, I feel, and having a very darker colour and a very light one for contrast and to provide the ‘neutral’ effect, was good, too.

The drawings are all hand-drawn, scanned, touched up in Photoshop, then live traced in Illustrator, and then broken apart into silhouettes, subtractive blocks and the lines, which are layered over the top. The text is all my own hand-drawn text and the same ‘You can never have too many’ is used throughout, with different pop colours and then the relevant word added in.

I did try to do a more hand-drawn spot in the middle to place the text in, but it just didn’t work – the cleanliness of the circle (and the square in which the whole is contained) contrasts well with the sketchiness of the loose hand-drawings.